That Constant Gnawing Guilt

For years now, I have felt the nagging and gnawing of my own conscience telling me something I don’t want to hear. It tells me that I am a hypocrite, that I don’t have my priorities in order, and that I’m guilty of callous indifference.

I enjoy taking long, hot showers and I rarely finish all the food I take, all the while knowing that clean water and ample food are luxuries, and that thousands of children die every day of waterborne illness and starvation.

I am obsessed with food—I even wrote my college essay on food—so I often eat in nice restaurants, yet I also understand that about three billion people in this world survive on less than $2 a day.

I read books like “Mountain Beyond Mountains,” and I imagine myself packing my bags for rural Haiti, Peru, or Africa to help treat diseases with Dr. Paul Farmer, Presley professor of social medicine. But, in the end, I’d choose to study abroad in Spain or eat my way through Italy.

I am here spending $180,000 on an education when, according to Doctors Without Borders, that same money could purchase 32 emergency health kits each of which cares for 10,000 displaced people for three months. That means that for my entire four years at Harvard, I could have cared for the health of 20,000 refugees. Who am I to say that my education here is worth 4 years of health care for 20,000 people? Who am I to say that Harvard has more value than someone’s life, let alone many lives?

To top it off, I don’t even work that hard. I play video games with my roommates, waste time on Facebook, and wait until four in the morning to write papers due that day. My GPA leaves much to be desired. When I miraculously manage to wake myself up for my morning classes, I usually fall asleep in the middle of lecture.

Although my day-to-day laziness might seem distant from the issue of charity, Peter Singer of Princeton University, a man whose views on eugenics I find morally reprehensible, has grasped the connection between the two in a way that is spot on.

He has posed the oft-mentioned hypothetical whereby a man can divert a runaway train onto a different track, destroying his most prized possession, a Bugatti sports car, but saving the life of a child further down the track. Only the most heartless of humans would approve of his actions should he choose not to divert the train and instead place the value of his car above the value of the child.

Yet, the truth remains that spending money on fancy food, an Ivy League education, or a plasma television inherently places more value on those items than on the lives of children with preventable diseases.

This is a moral qualm that America as a whole has failed to address properly. The government may justify its inaction since our citizens are privately some of the most charitable people in the world, but the government’s consistent failure to meet its agreement to donate 0.7 percent of GDP to foreign aid is despicable.

This circle is even harder to square for the American family. Despite high levels of charitable giving as compared to other countries, the real numbers aren’t so impressive. The average household donates 3.1 percent of its income each year, or about three dollars a day per person. The average Starbucks customer also spends $3 for her cup of morning coffee. The extent of our consumer culture, from big screen TVs to name-brand clothing, belies our charitable spirit.

The difficult question that this raises is, “Where do you draw the line? Sure, you can live an ascetic lifestyle and give all your money away to charity, but is that the only morally acceptable course of action?”

I don’t know. Of course, I would like to know, but I’m not sure anyone can answer that for me. So far, this place has only made me more confused.

On the one hand, compared to the average American citizen, I should be proud that I know where Darfur is, that I care about the genocide raging there, that I raised money in high school to help the victims, that I question myself, that I even feel this moral struggle.

But why should I be proud? Here I am, not afflicted by these fundamental problems and what do I do with my time? I play “Goldeneye,” eat filet mignon, and Wikipedia-surf, and I don’t volunteer much or consistently advocate for the poor. I plan to devote my life to public service, but what does it say about my character that I don’t practice that service ethic now? Problems exist now, not only in the future, and here I am typing this self-indulgent elitist schlock on the Dell laptop my parents bought me.

But I think that more than anything, I just want to know that I’m not the only one who feels this way. If we all go through the same daily mini-dilemmas, maybe we can collectively devise our answer, where we draw our moral line as a campus and as a generation. Families too poor to afford a life-saving mosquito net should demand no less.



Jarret A. Zafran ’09 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House.